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Art Pope spins until he gets dizzy

In several interviews this month, Pope said he did not think the Rural Center grant had any effect on the lease terms – and he suggested his company did not know about the Rural Center’s aid as the deal came together. “There was no knowledge and no involvement of how the work was done on that (shopping) center owned by the developer and where his source of funding came from,” Pope said.

As I've mentioned before, in many cases, rural development projects simply won't happen in the absence of government grants, and this one is no different. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with a man who would take advantage from that and then lie about it to save his much-lauded Libertarian reputation:

Documents show that on Aug. 15, 2012, the chief operating officer at Variety Wholesalers, C. Wilson Sawyer, wrote a “job commitment” letter to the developer that said the store would hire at least 25 full-time employees. Of those, 22 were cashiers or associates to be paid about $14,000 a year.

Sawyer wrote in the letter that a condition of Variety Wholesalers’ lease was that the developer would be able to obtain a grant for the site.

Get that? Art Pope's right-hand-man made it clear that without government assistance, Variety Wholesalers wasn't going to suit up, much less play in this game. Which makes the following:

“They like to claim credit for everything,” Pope said. “They like to build up IOUs because, ‘We helped you.’ In this particular case, I’d say it was Variety Wholesalers who creates the jobs when we open the stores and sell products at a good price and the customers want to shop there and it, in turn, allows us to pay our employees and pay our rent. That’s what creates the jobs. Not a grant.”

somewhere between disingenuous and delusional. This is standard stuff from Libertarians, who automatically filter out any positive influences government has had on any successful economic formula. Once they've happened, that is. Not unlike a mental patient who doesn't connect the dots between feeling okay and the medicine they take every day.

But in Pope's case, I'm pretty sure he knows exactly how important government assistance is to the revitalization of rural areas. He just doesn't care, because it conflicts with the religion he's built up around himself.

Comments

Hi, I saw this on facebook but can't forward it easily because you did not provide a concise intro sentence or two summarizing what Pope has done and said and been caught doing. The way you have it, you're just preaching to the choir. What Pope is up needs to be broadly known, which means you have to take the time to be clear and helpful.

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"I will have a priority on building relationships with the minority caucus. I want to put substance behind those campaign speeches." -- Thom Tillis, Nov. 5, 2014

Hypocrisy AND sleaze all in one package! Mrs. Tucker must be so proud of her son!

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"I will have a priority on building relationships with the minority caucus. I want to put substance behind those campaign speeches." -- Thom Tillis, Nov. 5, 2014

I'm not a blogger, and appreciate what you are doing, but here are some examples on Facebook, where I think the person who glances at what I've written comes away with some info:

"of course: Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator who told a gun victim's mom he would vote for background checks and then didn't, has a racist anti-semitic homophobic teenage son spewing nonsense all over the internet"

"Man with 0.0. blood alcohol content charged with DUI; his real problem is that it was Arizona and he was DWB."

"The first thing you see on the UNC campus is a statue of a Confederate soldier with a gun, put up 100 years ago yesterday. Traditionalists claim the statue stands for duty and sacrifice, but the archived text of a speech given at the dedication bigwig talks about what the confederate soldier did for the Anglo Saxon race *after* the war, and how the speaker, "100 yards from where we stand... horse-whipped a negro wench ...because she had ... insulted ... a Southern lady," and refers to doing this as "a pleasing duty.""

"Protests, including arrests, against the horrible plans of the all-GOP state government in NC to pass a lot of stupid and immoral legislation."

"NRA head kook Wayne LaPierre has been a clueless jerk for a long time, as seen in this letter from the elder Pres. Bush in which Bush resigns from the NRA"

I've en blogging for a while, but haven't engaged much on Facebook yet. Working on that. For the most part, what BlueNC posts you see on Facebook are auto-generated. In other words, they are extracted from the blog here and posted automatically. They're not written with Twitter or Facebook in mind, although that is something that probably should be considered.

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